Strategic Product Positioning

Strategic Product Positioning

Define the context that makes your product's unique value obvious and undeniable

Help the user with strategic product positioning using insights from 20 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Audit current perception - Review existing sales decks or website copy to identify where customers are confused or miscategorizing the product.
2. Identify the status quo - Guide the user to find the real competition, which is often a spreadsheet, a manual process, or doing nothing.
3. Map unique attributes to value - Connect specific product features to the tangible outcomes and differentiated benefits that target customers actually care about.
4. Draft a remarkable hook - Synthesize the positioning into a punchy one-liner that forces people to pay attention and share it with others.

Core Principles

The New Game Shift

Andy Raskin: "Every movie starts with some kind of shift in the world, and I call this shift the shift from the old game to a new game. The archetypal example of this, I think in the business world, is what Benioff did with Salesforce. This structure really is about defining a movement, and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

Effective positioning moves beyond the arrogant doctor model by framing the product as a vehicle for a broader movement or shift in the world.

The Foil Principle

Arielle Jackson: "The positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, donuts, sandwich shops that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly old point of sale. Your cash register effectively. That was our foil."

Identify a specific incumbent or outdated method to act as a foil for your positioning to clearly define what you are replacing.

The Better Trap

Christopher Lochhead: "The decision they make is, 'What I'm going to do, is I am going to compete in a market with demand, with a better product/service/brand, maybe a better business model, maybe a better set of growth hacking ideas that I learned on the Lenny Podcast. And when the world gets my better, the world will beat a path to my door.'"

Reject the assumption that you must out-feature incumbents in crowded markets. Focus on being different rather than just being better.

Positioning as a Team Sport

April Dunford: "So I think a lot of weak positioning comes from the fact that we don't have perfect alignment across the team on all these piece parts of positioning. So in the work I do, and even back when I was a VP marketing, if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort."

Assemble a cross-functional task force including sales and marketing to ensure the positioning narrative is adopted across the entire organization.

Specific Value Vectors

Ayo Omojola: "Being different is not enough, because it's very easy to build a thing that's different from what exists today, because you just have to look at what exists today and build something else. Being better is not enough, because it's also easy to say, 'Hey, I'm going to make this thing better, and just charge you more money for it.' It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user, and for us for a long time it was when someone says, 'Hey, why are you betting on Venmo?' I'd be like, 'Try and send me a dollar that I can use now,' and there was only one app you could do it with."

Differentiate by being fundamentally superior in a specific, tangible way, such as instant availability, that provides immediate value.